Fail in Order to Succeed

This is a painting.

I have created a lot of poor drawings. My goal, as I have often been instructed, is to fail fast in order to get over the failure and move onto success. In creating these poor drawings, I have been able to learn from my mistakes and create better drawings. But no one else benefits from my failure and my progress is slow. I fail only on my own small scale. In Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky shows that individual failures like mine can lead to communal success. Through new social media efforts, the failure of one individual can still contribute to the success of a community. It's as if many people like me created poor drawings and yet still as a whole created a masterpiece.

What has happened in social media translates to something like this in painting: There are hundreds of people all working on one canvas. A few people paint and produce awful work. Others paint over the original failures with some of their own failures. Eventually a few people in the group translate their knowledge of these failures into successful segments of the painting. In the end, a masterpiece is produced. In practice, hundreds of people cannot work at one small canvas nor can one artist cover up the failure of another perfectly. But in other applications, this is exactly what social media is doing.

Social media allows hundreds to fail in order for a select few to analyze the failure and create success. Clay Shirky speaks the idea clearly: "Failure is free high quality research, offering direct evidence of what works and what doesn't." My failures in drawing people, writing stories, programming graphics, organizing parties, or generating good ideas have only benefited me. But as I share them, my mistakes and the mistakes of many others can be combined into one collective knowledge channeled into success.

So start failing and more importantly, sharing your failures so that the world can benefit.